• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

MAYDAY

  • Culture
  • Interviews
  • Reviews
  • Nonfiction
    • Contests
  • Translation
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • About
    • Submit
      • Contests
      • Contest Winners
      • MAYDAY:Black
    • Open Positions
    • Masthead
    • Contributors

UNTITLED a series of prose poems by Antara Datta

January 1, 2010 Contributed By: Antara Datta

Window

She came to live with us when I was 12. She would sit at the window with a toothless smile, wrapped in white with breasts that needed no cover or holding up, eyes layered with years, looking at the road outside, longing for home. Perhaps. Big mother. Old mother. Grand mother. She left me a gold bracelet, an old name and a longing for the road.

 

Rivers

I walk around the sodium-lit rings of Connaught place late at night looking for you. There, the wrinkles on my hand look even, and I see you on that bench, looking at your hands too. There, we think of rivers—Jordan, Amazon, Nile, Euphrates, Congo—and our silted feet.

 

A Picture

A certain bus ride in late August—Calcutta. The trees moved in a hurry. Windswept. She stood on the last step, socks pulled down to the ankles, the left toe caressing the back of the right knee—daring. 17. His hands held her close without props or excuse—then—a whisper, not a secret. 19 and something. Blood intimate. Cousins. The moment—rain-soaked. Pressed dry in words now.

 

Improvement

I came to you as monsoon grass, surprising your toes with an occasional mushroom or primrose. I was the first splash of orange on a canvas, unsure whether to be sunrise or sunset. I am an even green—mowed and pruned, and hang as art in the corner of your soft-lit living room. I am since, much improved.

 

Me and You

I can play at being you in the dark- easy with love, soft with lies, blue of skin, hazy of years. But keep that light away from me-you! In focus, I become more human than a god.

 

Nightfall

I see the dark come at me through the window like an unlit truck. I stand in its way, my hands hold each other, locked in forever. Prepared. The light on the table, gentle and beguiled under a shade, hits my face in a flash. Blinding me for a while. Coward.

 

Return to table of contents for Issue 2 Winter 2010

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: January 1, 2010

Further Reading

6,746 Miles To My Happy Place
by Kara Donovan

Before going to Korea, I hated being Asian. Growing up in a very white community didn’t help either. I grew up where we rarely learned about other cultures, and when we did, I was beyond anxious. I thought of myself as being white, and when someone brought up my being Asian, I would be so […]

Sons of The Confederacy 2.0: Not Just a Few Bad Apples
by Laketa Smith

Finally, after one of the most suspenseful and unnerving elections of my lifetime, the United States Congress was poised on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, to certify Electoral College votes, a long-held ceremonial element of every incoming presidential cabinet. Instead, mayhem descended on the capital city, and Congress itself, as a mob of Trump supporters laid […]

THE AVIAN GOSPELS by Adam Novy

an excerpt from THE AVIAN GOSPELS by Adam Novy Short Flight / Long Drive Books 278 pp. $12.95   Morgan had begun to fear the surface. Norwegians were an inch away from rioting, many carried weapons, staves and clubs and bats they’d spiked with nails, not to mention guns, and he knew how the RedBlacks would […]

Primary Sidebar

Recently Published

  • Inside the Kaleidoscope
    by Jane O. Wayne
  • Two Poems by Luis Alberto de Cuenca
    translated from the Spanish by Gustavo Pérez Firmat
  • I Hope Your Birthday Is So Beautiful, It Hurts to Look at It
    by Josette Akresh-Gonzales
  • Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin
    translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang,
    reviewed by Jacqueline Schaalje
  • Verge
    by William Cordeiro

Trending

  • Eight Contemporary Female Irish Artists to Fall In Love With Immediately
    by Aya Kusch
  • George Saunders on A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
    by Brianna Di Monda
  • Sellouts 1970: Love Story: The Year a Screenplay-Turned-Novel Almost Broke the National Book Award
    by Kirk Sever
  • Cool Uncle
    by Emmett Knowlton
  • I Know Who Orville Peck Is
    by Robin Gow
  • Painting to Empower: An Interview with Artist Harmonia Rosales
    by Aya Kusch
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Footer

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter

Business


Reprint Rights
Privacy Policy
Archive

Engage


Open Positions
Donate
Contact Us

Copyright © 2023 · New American Press

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.